Continuing on with our coverage of ICSE 2011, meet Dr. Victor Pankratius. Dr. Pankratius heads the Multicore Software Engineering investigator group at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Germany. He also serves as the elected chairman of the Software Engineering for parallel Systems (SEPARS) international working group. Dr. Pankratius' current research concentrates on how to make parallel programming easier. His work on multicore software engineering covers a range of research topics including empirical studies, auto-tuning, language design, and debugging.

In this video, Wolfram Schulte joins Victor to discuss the challenges of making concurrency easier for developers. One of the really interesting approaches that Victor and team are investigating is concurrency auto-tuning, and the example discussed here involve adding OS kernel-level support for auto-tuning user mode applications for manycore processor architectures. This is very fascinating research with great potential. Concurrency auto-tuner in an OS kernel? Concurrency-enlightened operating systems? Why not? Always great to meet young innovators with no fear of failure. I hope to see this type of thing materialize. Very interesting research and real world problem. Go Victor. Go!

February 08, 2011

When you think about all the code executing in the world at any given time, there's a good chance you're thinking about a lot of code written in C/C++ (aka native code). As Mohsen Agsen mentions so astutely in this impromptu and candid conversation, C++ can be thought of as the dark matter of the developer universe: there is so much of it all around us, hiding in the computational shadows, powering so much of what we take for granted, technologically.

C++ is currently undergoing a renaissance. This means that, by definition, the language, compilers and compositional tooling are evolving and coalescing into a state that maximizes native developer efficiency, productivity, and creativity across hardware and software domains (PCs, mobile devices, embedded systems, operating systems, user applications, services, etc). C++ is a powerful "systems" programming language, but it's more than that. It's object oriented, but it's more than that. At Microsoft, most of our flagship products are written in C++ (and C, like the Windows kernel...). As somebody with a keen interest in programming languages and software engineering, generally, I wanted to get some answers to broad questions concerning the language that consistently ranks near the top of the most widely used general purpose programming languages in the world. Who better to talk to than some key technical leaders driving Microsoft's Visual C++ business?

Mohsen Agsen is a Microsoft Technical Fellow and veteran C++ developer who runs the VC++ engineering team. Craig Symonds is the Director of Program Management for VC++ and a long time Microsoft dev tools veteran. Both Mohsen and Craig have been at the company for many years and have a ton of industry experience. I paid them a visit to see what’s on their minds these days regarding the native developer community, C++, Visual Studio, and more. As you will learn, Microsoft and Visual Studio, specifically, are re-doubling efforts to take part in the native code renaissance. Accordingly, you may see advances in our native tooling that the team thinks of as “C++ first” -> VC++ will extend its capabilities on a faster pace than it has ever done so in the past, at times surpassing the other VS languages/runtimes, in specific scenarios. This is exciting and a long time coming, but of course it's more passion than promise at this point. There is no specific news here, just perspectives and insights among some very bright people driving Microsoft's C++ efforts. I really enjoyed the conversation with Craig and Mohsen and hope to chat with them again in the near future.

C

October 16, 2008

Welcome to the 100th episode of Going Deep! It's been a great ride so far and I hope you've been enjoying the show over the years. For this momentous occasion, meet Bart de Smet, a software engineer extraordinaire on the WPF team who spends his free time blogging (what an incredible wealth of truly useful technical information to be found on Bart's blog!) and creating custom LINQ providers. In fact, Bart is probably the world's most prolific LINQ provider creator, from LINQ-to-MSI to LINQ-to-Simpsons! How does he do it???

Of course, in this special episode who better to have involved in this LINQ'ified conversation (with lots of whiteboarding) than LINQ co-creator, programming languages designer, fundamentalist functional programming high priest and Channel 9 star Erik Meijer? In fact, given that this is an Expert to Expert Going Deep, Erik co-conducts the interview (and he's great at it as usual!). Nothing better than watching and listening to two experts geeking out at a whiteboard!

What makes LINQ so readily "providable"? How does Bart concoct his LINQ provider magic? Here, we dig into the details that enable LINQ-to-Anything.

Tune in. There's a lot of very useful technical information here (which I hope is the case for all 100 Going Deep episodes).

January 19, 2007

﻿How will imperative programming langauges evolve to suit the needs of developers in the age of Concurrency and Composability? What role can programming languages play in enabling true composability? What are the implications of LINQ on the furture of managed (CLS-based) and unmanaged(C++) languages? How will our imperative languages (static) become more functional (dynamic) in nature while preserving their static "experience" for developers?

Answers to these questions and much more are to be found in this Channel 9 interview with some of Microsoft's leading language designers and programming thought leaders: Anders Hejlsberg, Technical Fellow and Chief Architect of C#, Herb Sutter, Architect in the C++ language design group, Erik Meijer, Architect in both VB.Net and C# language design and programming language guru, and Brian Beckman, physicist and programming language architect working on VB.Net.

This is a great conversation with some of the industry's most influential programming language designers. Tune in. You may be surprised by what you learn...

August 25, 2006

David Tarditi and Sidd Puri, scientists at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA, are creating some really compelling managed libraries that provide an elegant approach to writing highly parallel data intensive code. They basically hack the GPU to enable roaringly fast parallel computation. They call this .NET-based framework "Accelerator" and explain it in detail on Channel 9. Check it out and get the bits in your hands now. This is great stuff.

February 17, 2006

I recently interviewed Bill Gates on Channel 9. He talks openly about IE, future of software, and even where he surfs on the web! It was an honor to meet him. He's a really down to earth person and very nice. You'd never guess he's worth 48 billion dollars. Enjoy!

January 31, 2006

Well, we (some of the folks who brought you PDC03 and PDC05) are putting on another conference and it's targeted at web devs, designers and business professionals who work in the online world. Folks like Amazon, Yahoo, etc. That's who we want to engage and show them our cool technologies that will help them be more productive, profitable, and happy. Something different here, though. We will spend a lot of time conversing with the attendees in groups, addressing their feedback and concerns in real time. How many conferences do that? None that Microsoft puts on. MIX06 is an atypical event and the first of its kind put on by Microsoft.

It should be a great conference given that it will be a significant departure from the traditional Microsoft events. More laid back, more attendee-focused (meaning more time really listening to the attendees vs spraying information all over everybody with a rushed Q&A at the end. No. Not this time. Not at Mix.)

Besides the great things we'll be addressing for the WWW-minded, we'll be in Vegas. Vegas, baby! Definitely one of the better venues for a conference, not to mention we'll be at the Venetian.

I highly encourage any of you in the online world to try and make it. If you're a dev or a designer or both or somebody who thinks about www.business all the time, well, come on down. It will be worth it for sure. But enough of the rhetoric.

December 13, 2005

Seasoned Niner (Channel 9 member), Larry Osterman, an SDE and 20 year Microsoft veteran, and Elliot H Omiya, a Software Architect and audio guru, dig into the innerworkings of Vista's updated Audio Stack and new user mode API in the latest installment of the Going Deep series on Channel 9. Much of the guts of Windows audio have been moved up into the land of the user and this has consequences for both Windows audio developers at the API level and for Windows at the general programmability, reliability and stability levels.

December 07, 2005

We just released a great video interview on Channel 9 that should be of tremendous interest to those of you who write managed threaded code: The Concurrency and Coordination Runtime (CCR) is a lightweight port-based concurrency library for C# 2.0 developed by George Chrysanthakopoulos in the Advanced Strategies group at Microsoft. Here, we have a deep discussion about CCR with George, a Software Architect, and Satnam Singh, Architect. You can get more info about CCR on the CCR Wiki. This is super cool stuff and represents a really innovative approach to making managed threaded programming more readily understandable and predictable.